Extract email address from body of an email

[DrBone]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking on a product to automate our mail box around different departments, however we are running trough some issues. So what we trying to achieve:
1. Email arrive to your mailbox > flow reads an email and look for email address inside a body > forward email to that specific email address.


example of an email:


From: email@email.com
Subject: Thank you for your email.
Body:

Dear Person,
Thank you for your ... some text ... please forward this email to: example123@sometext.com.
Some text, and more text
Thank You.

I want flow to look inside this email and look for whatever email address is inside a body to forward and then forward whole thing to that specific email.
- Is that can be achieved ? If so could anyone give any directions where to go ?

Thank you for your time and help

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @DrBone ,

Do you want to extract an email address from the arrived email body?

You need to combine with functions such as indexof, substring, sub, add, etc.

I have made the following flow for your reference.

After the trigger When a new email arrives, add action Html to text to convert the email body to plain text.

Add Compose action with the following code:

add(indexOf(body('Html_to_text'),'please forward this email to:'),29)

Compose2 with the following code:

add(lastIndexOf(body('Html_to_text'),'.com.'),4)

Compose3 with the following code:

substring(body('Html_to_text'),outputs('Compose'),sub(outputs('Compose_2'),outputs('Compose')))

The above functions will finally return the required email address.

Images for your reference:

Best regards,

Mabel          

[DrBone]

Hi,
Thank you for your response.
It seems to work however there is few challenges with it.
Not all emails have ending by ".com" also if there is added signature with website address is registered it as well.
Ex of an email:
From: test123@example.com
Subject: some text

Hi, some text
Some more text
Please forward to: example@example.com
There is some more text
Regards
Name surname
123 street name
Country
Code
www.example.com

Output of it is:
"example@example.com
There is some more text
Regards
Name surname
123 street name
Country
Code
www.example.com"

Also some emails are
Could you forward this email to: emailAddress
I mean all emails are different and don't have specific string of "forward to:"

Solution for email ends .co.uk or .com and/or condition ?
Could use it however how it works with website address in signature ?

Thank you.

[v-yamao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @DrBone ,

Thanks for updating.

I am afraid that it might be difficult to achieve your goal using WDL functions simply.

However, there is a connector Parser, which could be used to extract data from emails & automate your workflow with our powerful email parser software.

Please check the following doc for more details:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/mailparser/

Best regards,

Mabel

[SimBon]

I recently faced this very problem myself. Having read through the discussion, I wanted to contribute by proposing an alternative that might simplify extracting email addresses from the body of an email using the capabilities of AI Builder in Power Automate.

Among its various models, AI Builder offers the "Entity extraction prebuilt model" which natively supports the recognition of certain types of "entities," including "Email".

By leveraging this entity extraction model, you can easily recognize and extract the email address from the text without having to write complex expressions or manually handle text processing.

Here are the basic steps I used:

1. From the incoming email in the inbox, I extracted the body of the text using the "from HTML to text" action.
2. I initialized the "Email" variable to which I later assigned the value extracted by the entity extraction model.
3. I added the "AI Builder > Entity extraction prebuilt model" action to process the body of the text prepared by the previous action.
4. I inserted a control action "Apply to each" with a "Condition" to review all the "Entities" extracted by the AI Builder action and allow only the one of interest to pass, namely: "Entity type" = "Email". In the "Yes" branch of the "Condition," I assigned the value of the "Entity type: Email" to the previously created "Email" variable.

Once extracted, the email address becomes available as an output for subsequent actions and can be used, for example, to populate a field in a database, send a follow-up email, or any other necessary operation.

[VictorIvanidze]

Hi @SimBon,

could you please let me know how long your flow will handle 10 short (less than 1 KByte) emails?  

[SimBon]

Hi @VictorIvanidze , approximately from 3 to 11 seconds.

My test email is 39 KB.

This is the flow:

(In the meantime I'm testing the nice "Compose" solution suggested here by @grantjenkins )

[SimBon]

Update: with 'Compose' it is much faster (695 ms on the test run) and, in a well-structured mail like the one in the example, I can even extract the name of the recipient to use in the body of the reply mail.

The AI builder might be useful with poorly structured content, but with sources whose structure is known it is probably worth using 'Compose' (although it is not always pleasant to write down the expressions to extract the desired value).

[VictorIvanidze]

Thank you @SimBon.

I believe  @grantjenkins's solution can be faster if you exclude "HTML to text" action and will parse the HTML body itself..

[ibeldesouki]

Dear v-yamao-msft

i need to do the same extract the email address which is [marr.janan@worksmart.com] , here is the email body in my case

[[[ 

A high-severity alert has been triggered

⚠ Detected phishing in an email message at time of delivery.

Severity: ● High

Time: 5/3/2024 11:47:30 PM (UTC)

Activity: Protection

Details: 1 message hit on 4496f5f0-1b2e-44d7-4649-08dc6bcb62aa-10601310551749749306-1, sent by info@penaltyco.com to marr.janan@worksmart.com at time 5/3/2024 11:47:30 PM.

]]]